Womanism
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The word womanism was first used in 1863, with much the same meaning as "feminism" (source: Oxford English Dictionary). Later, it was revived by feminist author Alice Walker and became a commonly used term that indicated specifically African American Feminism. It has since reverted to a more encompassing version of feminism that crosses lines of race and class.
Walker first used the term in context in her collection of essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. The need for this term arose from the early feminist movements that were led specifically by white women who advocated social changes such as the right to move from the domestic to the working space. This feminist agenda ignored the fact that many women were not housewives and had been working all their lives to help support their families. In particular, African American women were already working women, but not out of choice, and not as a matter of personal fulfillment. Also, many first-wave white feminists had purposefully excluded women of color in their movement. Similarly, the Civil Rights Movement was also wanting. It focused on equality for African American men, but women were unintentionally left in the background.
Walker created the womanist movement out of these two separate movements. With the increasing use of the term, both African American Studies and Women's Studies programs began to incorporate womanism into university courses, and historians are regarded as womanist historians if they have incorporated the views and experiences of African American women in their accounts of history.
In the 1980's Dr Clenora Hudson-Weems created the term African Womanism and an accompaning paradigm to describe the unique viewpoint of those women formerly referred to as Womanists.
[edit] External links
- Womanist Theology
- Alice Walker Poetry (archive link, was dead)
